Electronic chips comprise digital, analog or a combination (i.e. mixed signal) circuits. The design of analog and mixed signal circuits is generally regarded as a dark art. Conventional techniques need highly skilled and scarce engineering resources, relatively long design cycles and often multiple iterations before a final product can be brought to market. Analog circuit design methodology has remained unchanged for a long time. Analog designers have had to live with technical and time-consuming efforts in order to design and optimize analog circuits. Electronic design automation (EDA) tools needed to simplify and speed up design processes have changed (i.e., advanced) little in the past years. There is a major opportunity for more design automation in the analog circuit design sector.
It would be desirable to implement a method and/or architecture for dynamic weighting and ranking of circuit design populations for analog circuit design optimization.